Usually it's the losing side that fights to undo a court decision. Here it was the opposite: the CFTC and Gemini jointly asked a judge to tear up a settlement they themselves had signed — and the judge said no.
The case goes back to 2022, when the commodities regulator accused Gemini of giving false or misleading statements to agency staff while they reviewed a proposed bitcoin futures contract. It ended in a January 2025 consent order: Gemini paid a $5 million civil penalty and accepted a permanent injunction against repeating the conduct.
That should have been the end of it. But in May 2026, under new leadership and a friendlier administration stance toward crypto, the CFTC ran an internal review and concluded the case should never have been brought — citing shaky whistleblower credibility, evidentiary gaps, and its own enforcement practices. Gemini and the regulator then filed a joint motion to vacate the entire settlement.
Judge Alvin Hellerstein in New York wasn't moved. He pointed out that Gemini had litigated against the CFTC for more than three years before voluntarily settling, fully aware of the case's weaknesses at the time. A regulator simply changing its mind about a case it already won, he reasoned, isn't grounds to rewrite history — that requires the kind of showing Federal Rule 60 demands, and neither side made it.
So the $5 million penalty and the injunction stand. The ruling is a reminder that even a regulator eager to go easy on a company can't just strike a deal to erase the past — a court treats a consent order as its own business, not a rubber stamp either party can withdraw at will.
